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Thanks very much Phil. I've gotten so much out of your blog posts and I recommend them to everyone who asks me about video SEO. Yes, flat on the page is working pretty well for us right now. The only times it's impractical is when the video is really long. In those instances we are either including the content via a tab, or even by creating a blog post with the video+transcript (much like what SEOMoz does for WBF videos). I appreciate you and all the others here responding to this question.

Thanks...I'll have a look....

Do what Irving said, park the domain just in case you need it. Use opensiteexplorer.org to get a clear picture of your backlinkprofile and start cleaning up suspicious and bad links that point to your site: http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?page=1&site=www.propdental.com&sort=page_authority&filter=&source=external&target=page&group=0 Look at the domain and page authorities of the page linking to you, look at the title of the page, look at the link anchor text or image their using. Don't like what you see? Add them to the Google Disavow Tool You could also always contact the webmaster of the site pointing/linking to your website and kindly ask them to remove the link or adjust the link (sometimes adjusting the anchor text is enough). This should help you on your way back to a healthy backlink profile. Offcourse besides cleaning up the backlinks, gain some new ones and prehaps do some guestposting or something to influence things more positively. Hopes this helps you a bit. kind regards Jarno

My personal point of view is if the content is 80%+ unique and has had a manual review to make sure that it is not Spam in any way so it makes sense  then it is fine for link building. How ever others will tell you this not the way to build a brand.

Hi Cary, You must clean up your anchor text, looks like you have tons of links anchoring in as " | <a class="clickable title link-pivot" title="See top linking pages that use this anchor text">limo buses san diego"</a> |  176 | **      320** | http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/anchors?site=www.aallinlimos.com A recommended link ratio is 7:3.   7 being Branded 3 being diverse, exact, and long tail. It would probably be best to contact all these sites and ask them to change the anchor to your brand name. That is if the site is not spaming/overoptimizing and has a clean link profile. Make sure to keep track of your work. If the above does not help, or you cannot get these anchors/links removed. After a few weeks (IMO 12 weeks) send Google everything you have done in a reconsideration request. During this time you can still build good branded links. Hope this helps.

This is another tricky situation. I think the message you have received is not about Penalty, it is just a precautionary message send to you just to inform that the link profile does not look natural and needs some pruning. What I believe is that if the links not coming from low quality link pages, directories, forums, web 2.0 sites etc [I am assuming that they are at one point built by an SEO company], you need to get rid of them. _Take it as precautionary measure because your link profile has already raised the flag of spam and therefore, it is your duty to clean it. It is better safe than sorry. And Losing one or two keyword rank is far better than losing all the visibility altogether. _

They actually do have a few high value links, but also some junk that any 12 year old site will pick up over the course of time. But things aren't as rosy for them as it may seem.  Based on the few pages I looked at and their semrush page, I'd guess they've got some partial Panda issues. Either way, it would be hard for anyone to tell you exactly why they do still rank well for some terms.  It's not just any one or two or even five factors. If i had to guess though, it would be because of those few high value links, and the fact that they've been around for so long.

Ah okay - that notice is definitely a factor then and an important consideration not initially mentioned.  So as long as you have someone else working on the other issues described then we can focus on the patterns concept I initially mentioned. Several things that stand out when I'm reviewing links on a mass scale.I prefer to look at links grouped by domain in the first pass to help see these patterns. 1. Page titles of pages sending links.  Quite often, they're titles that blatantly scream junk/low-quality or irrelevant to any topic your site is about, or even link-partnerships... or even outright mention SEO. 2. Domain names/URLs of pages sending links. Same concept - they can quite often obviously communicate that they're junk, irrelevant, or blatantly specifically sites for SEO or links. 3. Anchor Text - if you group by anchor text as a next pass, look for links where the anchor text is exact match keywords and then look at the page title of that linking page and it's domain name.  Patterns can be spotted of low quality.  If needed, you can click over to a URL and just look at the page that  link is coming from. 4. After all that process, as you have marked links as being bad, regroup them by domain.  At that point you will likely still need to go through remaining links and go to at least one link from each domain to examine the page or just look at the overall domain for quality. NOTE - the part where you examine a site sending links does require you to be able to know how to spot a bad site already.  Like - "Can I trust this site?" "Is this site obviously a fake site?" and other such questions need to be asked and answered. And if a link is on a good site, is it a forum or blog comment?  Is it using an SEO relevant keyword as the person's signature name? Or is it even a legitimate and relevant comment, even if the link isn't using keyword anchors? There are so many subtle indicators I could add but in reality the best way to go is to dive in and remember to look for patterns.  As you spend the time doing this work, patterns become more and more obvious...

You should check this out http://www.seomoz.org/blog/penguins-pandas-and-panic-at-the-zoo

I work with a lot of sites that have been affected by Panda and the type of thing that you are talking about doing is exactly the type of thing that has gotten most of these sites flagged by Panda. You're client is right that it is a good idea to have text next on the pages.  But, if the text is not unique then what Google does is say, "This page is essentially the same as one that is already in our index.  There's no reason showing two identical pages to searchers so we won't show this one."  If enough of your pages are duplicates then the whole site (including original pages) can be flagged by Panda.

the site we are working with that experienced a current drop as well.

Getting directory links is great if the category is relevant, and the site has a natural link profile. Getting "any" directory link is not helpful: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/web-directory-submission-danger Directory links are also known as a citation which is going to help your "Google Places" results rank better...

Seems to me that they are engaging in some black hat tactics to get these high rankings. The keyword density on the home page is also quite high for that keyword. "online casino". I would also be interested in getting the group's thoughts on this.